Tag Archives: Online

Glitch: A Beautiful Something

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My name is Cheese­fish, and against all logic it is one of the more mun­dane names I have come across.  I am wear­ing a sari and I have a fox on my head.  My hobby: squeez­ing chick­ens.  My mis­sion: to become the finest chef the world of Glitch has ever seen.

Glitch is a browser-based, entirely combat-free, mas­sively mul­ti­player online game. And for the last few days, it has been some­thing of an obses­sion. It is Maple Story, if Maple Story cut the com­bat (and the Korean-ness) and focussed solely on explo­ration and craft­ing mechan­ics. And it’s the explo­ration that makes it. As a 2D scrolling flash game, there are none of World of War­craft or Guild Wars’ sweep­ing vis­tas here, but it makes up for it in vari­ety. One moment you may be explor­ing a lush and utterly nor­mal for­est, but one stop on the ever-present inter­con­ti­nen­tal sub­way drops you off in a land of pas­tel where the hills have eyes.

Stranger places still await the intre­pid explorer. Keita Taka­hashi, cre­ator of Kata­mari Damacy, has had his hands on this game and it cer­tainly shows. (The other more recog­nis­able mem­bers of the team are, bizarrely, the founders of Flickr.) There have clearly been some… unique minds behind the design of this game, which become most appar­ent when acquir­ing raw mate­ri­als from the environment.

Need meat? You get it by nib­bling on pigs, but only after pet­ting them. Milk? From but­ter­flies of course, but they must be mas­saged first. Grain can be obtained by squeez­ing chick­ens, but eggs? Oh, right. Egg plants.

From the odd inter­ac­tions with fauna to the bizarre con­trap­tions you can use, the ever-humorous quest descrip­tions and the pet rock that does your learn­ing for you, there’s a strange sense of humour at work here and it works very well indeed.

Glitch is also an exam­ple of one of my most hated things — an Energy-based game that has no end. But here, it doesn’t feel mali­cious like the game-killing ‘games’ of Zynga and Play­fish. Energy is plen­ti­ful and refills com­pletely every few hours, and even with my character’s mediocre cook­ing skills, she can eas­ily whip up enough odd food and drinks to keep her energy and mood full. Skills are learned over min­utes, hours or days of real time, but again unlike Far­mVille and its kin, they’re not just a mech­a­nism to drag you back to the game. There doesn’t feel like an urgency to get them learned, and besides, you can man­age them from the web­site or the iOS app with­out hav­ing to touch the game itself.

So what the heck is Glitch? It doesn’t seem much like a game, as there’s no way to win and no rea­son to com­pete against any­one. It’s a world to explore, to cre­ate and add to, and appar­ently, to hold farm­ers’ mar­kets in.

It resem­bles noth­ing quite so much as a twenty-first cen­tury upgrade of the MUSH, the shared envi­ron­ments from the early ‘90s. If it allows any­thing like a MUSH’s abil­ity for play­ers to cre­ate and expand the world, it will be a won­der. But cre­at­ing with text is easy; doing so with graph­ics much more com­plex, and I can’t imag­ine the com­pany behind Glitch giv­ing up cre­ative con­trol so readily.

But even with­out that, even with­out an idea of what it is and what it’s going to be, it’s cer­tainly a beau­ti­ful some­thing.

Could I Live Without…?

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A cou­ple of months ago, I was par­tic­u­larly scathing about the crop of Face­book games that I was play­ing, par­tic­u­larly ones that had no end. The result? I no longer play any games on Face­book what­so­ever. As I bemoaned at length, not one of them was adding to my life in any appre­cia­ble way.

I won­der if it is now a good time to apply the same logic to var­i­ous online ser­vices — to be extremely crit­i­cal of them, to dis­cover whether or not they actu­ally add any value to my life. In short, could I live without…

 

1. A Google Account

As a search engine, Google is almost essen­tial to life on the inter­net today.  Like a lot of you, I have signed up to many Google ser­vices over the years, each one sim­ply on the merit that it was bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion (if there even was com­pe­ti­tion).  I go through phases of being alarmed at the amount of data Google col­lates about us all — their “do no evil” pol­icy is wear­ing thin in the eyes of their cus­tomers.  But could I man­age with­out mail, cal­en­dars and con­tacts syn­chro­nised between my phone and the web?  With­out the near-endless enter­tain­ment of Google Reader?  With­out the Android Market?

Although I resent Google’s domin­ion over my online exis­tence, its offer­ings are just bet­ter than oth­ers’.  And hav­ing an Android phone seals the deal.

Ver­dict: No.

 

2. GMail

If I can’t live with­out a Google account, maybe I should just dump the GMail part of it?  I’ve actu­ally done this once before; moved my e-mail whole­sale to my own server.  But I went back — it’s a nice feel­ing to be in charge, to have your own mail server, but every­thing was so much harder.  “Archiv­ing” and “tag­ging” become a multi-click ‘move’ oper­a­tion, IMAP has a host of strange issues, and no web­mail client is a patch on Google’s.

Ditch­ing GMail appeals, but two months down the line I’d prob­a­bly spend another evening mov­ing every­thing back again.

Ver­dict: Prob­a­bly not.

 

3. Twit­ter

I sus­pect I’m in the minor­ity, in that I fol­low no celebri­ties and don’t use Twit­ter for any­thing to do with “brand aware­ness” or “cus­tomer inter­ac­tion”.  I use it for talk­ing to my friends.  There are sim­ply too many of us, online too irreg­u­larly, to use instant mes­sag­ing — or god for­bid, phone calls — any more.  (Whether that says some­thing about the qual­ity of our inter­ac­tion, I’m not sure.)  But with­out Twit­ter I’d be largely unaware of what’s going on in the lives of the dozen or so peo­ple I care about the most.  Though my posts may be triv­ial and of inter­est to few, los­ing Twit­ter would be close to los­ing friends.

Ver­dict: No.

 

4. Face­book

The social net­work we love to hate, there are a whole host of rea­sons peo­ple would want to quit — dis­re­gard for pri­vacy, end­less Far­mville spam, lack of trans­parency / import & export func­tions — but yet, so few do.  I don’t play games on Face­book, I rarely post pho­tos, I don’t “like” pages or take quizzes.  I have around 300 “friends”, many of whom I haven’t seen since school and wouldn’t recog­nise in the street.

But there’s a few close friends and fam­ily that don’t use Twit­ter, and clos­ing my Face­book account would mean cut­ting them off.  And besides, there’s always that nag­ging thought: “you’re 26 years old, every 26-year-old is on Facebook!”

Ver­dict: It’s tempt­ing to try.

 

5. Google+

Like many geeks, I am an “early adopter” of Google+, a social net­work that’s still in beta.  Now and again I load the page or run the mobile app, to see what peo­ple have posted — and they’ve posted exactly the same as they posted on Twit­ter.  Plus, with­out an API, I never bother to man­u­ally copy my own Twit­ter and Face­book posts to G+ too.

It’s nice to be in there in case it picks up and becomes the next Social Net­work to Rule them All.  But right now, it’s tak­ing up brain power and space on my book­marks tool­bar, and I’m gain­ing noth­ing from it.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

6. Live­Jour­nal

All my Live­Jour­nal posts are already syn­di­cated from my blog, and I go through phases of dis­abling com­ments on my LJ posts to drag peo­ple to com­ment on the blog itself.  It rarely works, but I have so lit­tle inter­ac­tion with peo­ple through Live­Jour­nal these days that it barely mat­ters.  Live­Jour­nal is dying, at least from my per­spec­tive, and I have already declared it time to quit.  Per­haps now is the time.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

7. DeviantArt

Once upon a time, I posted sto­ries here with reg­u­lar­ity.  Now, it’s a place I visit daily on the off-chance that one of the cou­ple of artists whose pic­tures I enjoy has posted some­thing.  Usu­ally, they havent.  This is what RSS was made for.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

8. Flickr

Though firmly an ama­teur, I’m proud of my pho­tos and Flickr is where I choose to show them off.  It’s also where fam­ily mem­bers abroad go to see what we’re up to, and it’s my insur­ance against a hard disk crash eras­ing the bits and bytes of our mem­o­ries.  Just as with GMail, there’s a strong temp­ta­tion to move my pic­tures to my own server, and run my own image gallery — but Flickr just does it bet­ter.

Ver­dict: No.

 

9. Last.fm

I’ve been a keen scrob­bler since the days when peo­ple knew what “scrob­ble” meant, and it’s so easy to set up that I’ve always set it up on any new com­puter, oper­at­ing sys­tem or media player.  But why?  I know what my taste in music is, and I have lit­tle inter­est in my own lis­ten­ing his­tory.  My friends surely have even less.  The only rea­son I can see for con­tin­u­ing is that I’m proud of the amount of data I’ve gen­er­ated already — and that’s no rea­son at all for car­ry­ing on.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

10. Foursquare

In using Foursquare, I may be just as much a vic­tim of the sunk cost fal­lacy as I was in all those Face­book games.  I’ve now been “play­ing” for so long that I’ve stopped car­ing about beat­ing my friends; stopped car­ing how far away the next wall-chart sticker might be.  Check­ing in is just some­thing I do when I arrive at a place.  I’m now essen­tially get­ting noth­ing out of Foursquare, even though I’m still reli­ably giv­ing the com­pany and its affil­i­ates a com­plete his­tory of where I go and where I shop.

Ver­dict: Hell yes, ditch this yesterday.

 

What are your thoughts on my rea­son­ing?  Which ser­vices are you tied to, and which are you con­sid­er­ing leav­ing for good?  I’d be inter­ested to know.

Announcing: Full Width Facebook Lite

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Do I blog any­thing these days apart from new soft­ware? Oh well, here goes:

“Full Width Face­book Lite” is pos­si­bly the world’s short­est Grease­mon­key script: it sim­ply removes the right-hand bar in the new Face­book Lite, thus remov­ing the ad and the big white space, allow­ing the actual con­tent to span the full width. Use­ful for peo­ple who don’t like ads, and peo­ple with small displays!

To reit­er­ate, this is for the new Lite ver­sion of Face­book that’s cur­rently in beta at http://lite.facebook.com. It has no effect on reg­u­lar Facebook.

It requires Fire­fox with Grease­mon­key, and prob­a­bly works in any­thing else that sup­ports the same kind of user scripts.

There’s no point putting this under the GPL, it’s so sim­ple, so it’s pub­lic domain. You can grab it using the links below.

Full Width Facebook Lite

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This Grease­mon­key script was for the Lite ver­sion of Face­book that was in Beta in 2009. Sadly, Face­book Lite is no longer avail­able, mean­ing that this script is now redun­dant. How­ever, if you’d like a quick and easy exam­ple of how to use Grease­Mon­key to hide cer­tain divs (e.g. for remov­ing ads), check out the source code.

“Full Width Face­book Lite” is pos­si­bly the world’s short­est Grease­mon­key script: it sim­ply removes the right-hand bar in the new Face­book Lite, thus remov­ing the ad and the big white space, allow­ing the actual con­tent to span the full width. Use­ful for peo­ple who don’t like ads, and peo­ple with small displays!

It requires Fire­fox with Grease­mon­key, Safari with GreaseKit, or sim­i­lar. GreaseKit com­pat­i­bil­ity (via the in-built imple­men­ta­tion of GM_addStyle) was pro­vided thanks to ‘greut’ in this thread: http://userscripts.org/topics/1912. The auto-updater is pro­vided by this script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/20145.

There’s no point putting this under the GPL as it’s so sim­ple, so it’s pub­lic domain.

Announcing: SuccessWhale!

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For the last few days I’ve been work­ing on a sim­ple web-based Twit­ter client, to fill the void between the sim­plic­ity of Twitter’s own web inter­face and the broken-in-IE6 com­plex­ity of BeTwit­tered and Seesmic Desktop’s web interface.

It’s still under heavy devel­op­ment, and there are prob­a­bly a ton of bugs and miss­ing use­ful fea­tures. Please give it a try and let me know what you think. Bug reports are more than welcome!

The source code is licenced under the GNU GPL v3.

Update: Due to a move to the proper OAuth API, the soft­ware could no longer con­tinue to be called Fail­Whale, as someone’s already writ­ten a Twit­ter app with that name! Thus, until I or some­one else comes up with a good idea, it’s called SuccessWhale.

SuccessWhale

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Suc­cess­Whale is a web-based Twit­ter and Face­book client writ­ten in PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. It’s a multi-column client that will work just the same in any browser — even IE6. (And as far as I know it’s unique in that respect.) You can also use it while on net­works that block twitter.com. :) It’s free to use by any­one, has no adver­tis­ing, and source code is available.

Visit SuccessWhale.com to try it out!

Fea­tures

  • You can add as many Twit­ter and Face­book accounts as you like, dis­play­ing data from each, and you can choose which to post to every time.
  • Suc­cess­Whale has a multi-column view, which can be scrolled through if you want more than will sen­si­bly fit on your screen. Many columns are avail­able for each Twit­ter and Face­book account you reg­is­ter, includ­ing ones that com­bine noti­fi­ca­tions from all your accounts.
  • Suc­cess­Whale is inte­grated with my Twit­ter paste­bin, Twixt. Enter a reply longer than 140 char­ac­ters into the box in Suc­cess­Whale, and it will be short­ened auto­mat­i­cally using Twixt. Suc­cess­Whale also dis­plays the con­tents of Twixt posts inline, and expands short URLs.
  • You can use Suc­cess­Whale from places where twitter.com and facebook.com are blocked. To do so, you’ll have to log in from a com­puter that can see the sites first, then click “Accounts” in the top-right and cre­ate your­self a Suc­cess­Whale account. You’ll then be able to log in using that pass­word from any computer.
  • You can main­tain a “banned phrases” list, which will hide tweets con­tain­ing cer­tain phrases — great if you’ve got too many friends that spam their Foursquare check-ins to Twitter.

Screen­shot

Successwhale 2 Screenshot

Suc­cess­whale 2 Screen­shot (click for full size)

Sta­tus

Suc­cess­Whale is com­plete, released soft­ware, and cur­rently stands at ver­sion 2.0.1. It’s used by around 50 peo­ple — includ­ing myself — as their main Twit­ter and Face­book client, and a num­ber of sites around the inter­net have used the source code to inte­grate Suc­cess­Whale into their own sites. As far as I’m aware it has no bugs, but if you find any or would like to request any new fea­tures for the next ver­sion, you can con­tact me on Twit­ter (I’m @tsuki_chama), or via my con­tact form. If you’d like to sub­mit bug reports and fea­ture requests directly into my GitHub issue tracker, please reg­is­ter an account and do so.

Licence and Source Code

Suc­cess­Whale is licenced under the GNU GPL v3. You can get the source code from GitHub here.

This includes all the third-party code on which Suc­cess­Whale depends, includ­ing twit­teroauth, the Face­book PHP SDK, jQuery, the jQuery Form Plu­gin, the jQuery BlockUI Plu­gin, the jQuery Impromptu Plu­gin, the jQuery Force Redraw Plu­gin, the jQuery breakly Plu­gin, the jQuery “put cur­sor at end” Plu­gin, and the PHP Sim­ple HTML DOM Parser. (Cer­tain parts of the Suc­cess­Whale down­load are thus licenced under the MIT licence, which is more per­mis­sive than and com­pat­i­ble with the GPL licence that Suc­cess­Whale itself uses.)

Instal­la­tion

To run your own copy of Suc­cess­Whale, check out the source from GitHub and load it on to a web server that sup­ports PHP (v4 and above) and, option­ally, MySQL (any ver­sion). Fol­low the instruc­tions in INSTALL.TXT, which will include edit­ing config.php to enter your own settings.

Then just nav­i­gate to index.php, fol­low the instruc­tions on screen, and you should be up and running!

Development/Test Ver­sion

Ver­sion 2.1 of Suc­cess­Whale will bring sup­port for more ser­vices such as LinkedIn and Google Buzz, along with address­ing a num­ber of more minor fea­ture requests by users. Devel­op­ment is under­way. You can try it out on the test server, and get the bleed­ing edge source if you want to play with it.

The test server will break fre­quently with­out warn­ing, var_dump() stuff you don’t want the world to see, and may do weird unex­pected things. If you ask for help or report a bug with it, I will prob­a­bly be sar­cas­tic at you.

Thanks to…

Premier League Fantasy Football Team Picker

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For the 2011–2012 sea­son, the Pre­mier League Fan­tasy Foot­ball web­site has been changed to allow no access to the game stats with­out being logged in. This team picker will be offline until I find a work-around for this. Apolo­gies for the inconvenience.

This script picks the opti­mum team for the Pre­mier League’s Fan­tasy Foot­ball game, com­bin­ing player stats with online injury lists. Use­ful so that peo­ple like me, who know noth­ing about foot­ball, have a chance! Note that it is only as good as the data it has access to, so it’s prob­a­bly a bad idea to change your team accord­ing to its sug­ges­tions within the first few weeks of the sea­son — wait until it has more data before trust­ing it.

It’s hosted here, and should run auto­mat­i­cally every 24 hours. You can see the team it’s cur­rently pick­ing here:

Cur­rent Opti­mum Team

 

 

You can also get the source code from GitHub (pro­vided under the terms of the GPL v3 licence)

Look­ing for my team picker for the Daily Tele­graph game instead? It’s here.

Issues with this appli­ca­tion are tracked on Github’s issue tracker. Please sign up and report any issues you find!

Twixt

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Ever started reply­ing to some­one on Twit­ter, know­ing as you did it that there’s no way you could fit it all into 140 char­ac­ters? Did it drag on into two, three, four tweets, clut­ter­ing up everyone’s list? Twixt can help.

Hav­ing done just that sev­eral times, I was after a sim­ple, dis­pos­able way of putting more than 140 char­ac­ters up some­where on the inter­net that I can link from a sin­gle tweet. Thus, I cre­ated this sim­ple PHP script. Give it a block of text, and it’ll gen­er­ate you a unique web page and grab you an bit.ly short URL for it.

Visit twixt.successwhale.com to try it out!

API

Twixt also pro­vides an API for use by appli­ca­tions such as my own Suc­cess­Whale. To use it, sim­ply pro­vide it with a prop­erly URLEn­coded “tweet” argu­ment, for example: 

http://twixt.successwhale.com/index.php?tweet=Hello%20World!

Twixt will return the text-format out­put page of bit.ly’s “shorten” API, which will be either an HTTP 200 OK con­tain­ing the short­ened URL, or an HTTP 500 Inter­nal Server Error con­tain­ing the error message.

Sta­tus

Twixt is mature, released soft­ware, and as far as I know there are no major bugs that affect it. If you find any bugs or would like to request any new fea­tures, please con­tact me via my con­tact form. If you’d like to sub­mit bug reports and fea­ture requests directly into my Man­tis server, please reg­is­ter an account and do so.

Licence and Source Code

Suc­cess­Whale is licenced under the GNU GPL v3. If you’d like to run this from your own web­site, you can get the source code from GitHub. To run it, you’ll need a web server that can run PHP, and the direc­tory the script sits in must be world-writable (chmod 777). To use the API mode, you’ll have to reg­is­ter with bit.ly to get a user­name and API key, then insert those at the top of Twixt’s index.php.

Gunboat

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Gun­boat is a slow-paced 2D shooter writ­ten in Java and JoGL. It is far from fin­ished, but you can try out the cur­rent devel­op­ment ver­sion any­way. Issues with this appli­ca­tion are tracked on my Man­tis server, which is open to any­one to sign up, report bugs and request fea­tures. Please report any issues you find!

Down­loads

Gun­boat requires Java 1.6 and JoGL. Install Java as usual, and make sure the JoGL bina­ries (.dll files for Win­dows, .jnilib for Mac OS X, .so for Linux) are on the sys­tem path. (You can just put the libraries in the Gun­boat direc­tory if you like.)

Down­load Gun­boat itself here, and unzip it any­where you like. Run “java –jar dist/Gunboat.jar” to run the game. Gunboat.bat (Win­dows) or Gunboat.sh (Mac) will do this for you.

You can get the source code (and every­thing else) as a Net­beans project here on GitHub.

Online Ver­sion

I have done some work on an online browser-based ver­sion of Gun­boat. (Requires Google Earth plu­gin.) How­ever, it’s in its very early stages (you can’t shoot, there aren’t any ene­mies…). I’m not sure if I’ll con­tinue with it — one on had, level design has sud­denly become very easy! On the other hand, ick, Javascript. Source code for it is here on GitHub.

The rest of this page largely refers to the offline ver­sion, as it has many work­ing game­play com­po­nents that the online ver­sion does not.

Game­play

In Gun­boat, you are a small ship tasked to defend your har­bour against an attack­ing Navy. You can move freely around, and enemy ships will arrive in the har­bour in waves. (Some­times, allies will arrive to help you as well.) You must defeat all the ene­mies in each level to progress.

Your ship always appears at the bot­tom mid­dle of your screen. Around it is a coloured ring, which rep­re­sents your health. This will con­tract and change colour from green to red as you take dam­age. Attached to the right side of your ship is a British flag, rep­re­sent­ing your ship’s alleigance. Allies may have other flags, and ene­mies will always have a dif­fer­ent flag to yours. Every ship has both a flag and a health ring.

At the top of your screen is your HUD. On the left, your weapon load­out is dis­played. The yel­low ret­i­cle rep­re­sents your currently-selected weapon, though you can have up to 5 in each slot. On the right, your speed, head­ing and radar are dis­played. Speed and Head­ing are fairly self-explanatory. The radar has two modes that you can switch between. The default shows a map of the entire har­bour, with other ves­sels appear­ing on it. Red are ene­mies, yel­low allies, blue crates, and the green dot is you. The other radar mode, which you can tog­gle to at will, is a close-in radar. This only shows ships close to you, and thus gives higher detail. “Up” on this radar is in front of your ship, as opposed to the map view, where Up is always North.

Con­trols

The game is played with both key­board and mouse. The con­trols are:

  • Move Mouse: Aim
  • Mouse But­tons: Fire Pri­mary (Left) / Sec­ondary (Right) Weapon
  • WSAD: Change speed / heading
  • Q: Switch pri­mary weapons
  • E: Switch sec­ondary weapons
  • R: Switch radar modes
  • C: Switch cam­era angles (Fol­low, Above, Bird’s-Eye, Bridge)
  • H: Show/hide HUD (Might be use­ful on machines with­out 3D acceleration.)
  • N: Give your­self a Nuke (Cheat mode for test­ing only. Has no icon. Like a hom­ing mis­sile but faster, more agile, instakills, infi­nite ammo.)

Ship Types

  • Frigate (e.g. Type 23): This is the player’s ship, although you will encounter this ship many times as both ally and enemy. It is fast and nor­mally quite weak, and can carry a wide range of weapons. Yours has spe­cially rein­forced armour, so it has much more health than normal.
  • Marine Land­ing Craft: These tiny ves­sels are very fast, and sneak in close to their tar­gets. Their machine-gun is weak, but left unchecked they can do con­sid­er­able dam­age. They are easy to destroy.
  • MCMV (e.g. Sandown class): The Mine Coun­ter­mea­sure Ves­sel is fre­quently found accom­pa­ny­ing larger fleets. It is weak and poorly-armed.
  • Destroyer (e.g. Dar­ing class): These large ves­sels are tougher than frigates, and have mul­ti­ple weapon mount­ing points. They usu­ally have a com­bi­na­tion of guns, tor­pe­does and anti-air weapons.
  • Air­craft Car­rier (e.g. Invin­ci­ble Class): Air­craft car­ri­ers are huge, heav­ily armoured and largely unarmed. Their strength lies in their abil­ity to launch air­craft. A mix­ture of anti-air and anti-surface weapons is advised for tak­ing out a carrier.
  • Land­ing Plat­form Dock (e.g. Albion class): Much like the car­rier, the LPD’s strength lies in the smaller ves­sels that it can launch — in this case, land­ing craft. It is also more heav­ily armed and armoured than a carrier.
  • Bat­tle­ship (e.g. HMS Van­guard): Relics of a bygone age, these vast ships were designed to take on other bat­tle­ships on the high seas. They are slow and unmanou­ver­able, but have lots of armour and have lots of weapon mount­ing points. (These are boss-type enemies!)
  • Sup­ply Ship: Sup­ply ships are weak and unar­moured, and usu­ally drop inter­est­ing pick-up items. Be warned, though, they usu­ally come with a pow­er­ful escort!
  • Sub­ma­rine: (e.g. Astute Class) Sub­marines lurk below the sur­face, attack­ing with tor­pe­does, anti-ship and anti-air mis­siles. Spe­cific weapons are required to take out sub­marines, but they are lightly-armoured.
  • Heli­copter (e.g. Lynx): The heli­copter, a slow but manou­ver­able air­craft, is gen­er­ally used to drop depth charges.
  • VTOL Air­craft (e.g. Har­rier): The VTOL (Ver­ti­cal Take-Off and Land­ing) air­craft is fast and manou­ver­able, and can launch anti-ship mis­siles, anti-air mis­siles and tor­pe­does. How­ever, it has very lim­ited ammunition.
  • Stan­dard Air­craft (e.g. F35): These air­craft can only be launched from car­ri­ers. In addi­tion to a lim­ited sup­ply of mis­siles, they also have a mini­gun. They are extremely fast, but not very maneuverabe.

Weapons

  • Vick­ers 4.5-inch Mark 8: The stan­dard frigate deck gun, this weapon fires quickly and does a fair amount of damage.
  • Vick­ers .303 Machine­gun: This tiny weapon does lit­tle dam­age and has a very lim­ited range. It fires very quickly, but is extremely inac­cu­rate. It can hit aer­ial tar­gets as well as sur­face ones.
  • Twin QF 5.25-inch Mark 1: This is essen­tially the same as the 4.5-inch gun, except that there are two bar­rels per mount­ing point.
  • Twin BL 15-inch Mark 1: One of the highest-caliber naval guns ever put into ser­vice by the Royal Navy, this weapon fires slowly but over a long range, and the pro­jec­tiles are extremely dam­ag­ing. Not much sur­vives a hit with two 15-inch rounds.
  • Naval Laser Pro­to­type NDEW-1: This exper­i­men­tal direct-energy weapon fires rapidly, has a long range, and deals a lot of dam­age. How­ever, over-use of this weapon will cause it to explode and dam­age your ship!
  • RGM-84 Har­poon Mis­sile Launcher: This weapon, stan­dard equip­ment for frigates, fires anti-ship mis­siles. They are slow, but turn in mid-flight to hit the near­est enemy ship. They deal extreme amounts of dam­age. This weapon has lim­ited ammunition.
  • Tom­a­hawk Mis­sile Launcher: This weapon fires big­ger and bet­ter mis­siles. They are faster, more manou­ver­able, and cause more dam­age than their stan­dard vari­ant, but with even more lim­ited ammunition.
  • Sea Wolf Mis­sile Launcher: This is the anti-air equiv­a­lent of the stan­dard anti-ship mis­sile launcher. Its mis­siles move and home faster, to keep up with fly­ing targets.
  • Naval Rail­gun EMG Mod 0: Though not par­tic­u­larly dam­ag­ing and with an aver­age fire rate, this weapon’s strength is that it hits almost instantly, so there is no need to lead the target.
  • Stan­dard Tor­pe­does: Tor­pe­does are slow and dam­ag­ing, much like anti-ship mis­siles, except that they do not home on a tar­get. Their strength is that they can hit sub­merged tar­gets such as sub­marines as well as sur­face ships.
  • Sting Ray Hom­ing Tor­pe­does: Hom­ing tor­pe­does sac­ri­fice some of their war­head space for their hom­ing mech­a­nism, and thus deal less damage.
  • Depth Charges: These weapons are dropped near your ship rather than fired, and they do not move. They only hit sub­merged tar­gets — how­ever, any sub­ma­rine that gets lured onto the depth charge is instantly destroyed.
  • DS 30B 30mm Anti-Air Gun: This is the stan­dard anti-air weapon. Much like the 4.5-inch gun, it fires quickly and deals mod­er­ate damage.
  • Flak Can­non: This weapon deals extreme dam­age to air­borne ene­mies. How­ever, its rate of fire is very low.
  • Pha­lanx CIWS: Not strictly a weapon, the Pha­lanx will not shoot at ene­mies. Rather, it is an auto­mated tur­ret that will shoot down any enemy mis­siles within a cer­tain radius of your ship. It only lasts a lim­ited time.
  • Shield Gen­er­a­tor: An exper­i­men­tal device, the shield gen­er­a­tor cre­ates an elec­tro­mag­netic force-field around your ship. It deflects all incom­ing pro­jec­tiles, but it only lasts for a very lim­ited time.

Other In-Game Items

  • Health Crate: Some­times enemy ships will drop health crates when they’re destroyed. Steer your ship over these crates (marked with a red H) to restore some of your health.
  • Weapon Crate: Enemy ships with inter­est­ing weapons may some­times leave their weapon behind in a crate. (Sup­ply ships drop ran­dom weapon crates.) Steer your ship over them to pick up the weapon, and add it as an option in either your pri­mary or sec­ondary slot.

Telegraph Fantasy Football Team Picker

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5

This script picks the opti­mum team for the Daily Telegraph’s Fan­tasy Foot­ball game, com­bin­ing TFF’s player stats with online injury lists. Use­ful so that peo­ple like me, who know noth­ing about foot­ball, have a chance! Note that it is only as good as the data it has access to, so it’s prob­a­bly a bad idea to change your team accord­ing to its sug­ges­tions within the first few weeks of the sea­son – wait until it has more data before trust­ing it.

It’s hosted here, and should run auto­mat­i­cally every 24 hours. You can see the team it’s cur­rently pick­ing here:

Cur­rent Opti­mum Team

 

You can also get the source code from GitHub (pro­vided under the terms of the GPL v3 licence)

Look­ing for my team picker for the Pre­mier League game instead? It’s here.

Issues with this appli­ca­tion are tracked on Github’s issue tracker. Please sign up and report any issues you find! (The old, offline ver­sion of the TFF team picker main­tained its own change log, which can be found here.)

Jose Mour­inho in “Not Really Supe­rior to Robot After All” Shocker!

08–09 Fan­tasy Foot­ball results prove famous foot­ball dude not really all that much bet­ter at this than inan­i­mate lump of silicon!